UPGRADE SOUL - SerioComics 72 + Q&A with Author Ezra Claytan Daniels
Plus GeekDad's Jonathan H. Liu reviews SHOULD WE BUY A GUN? and Monthly Gun Debate Update June 2025
GeekDad Reviews SHOULD WE BUY A GUN?
Thank you to Jonathan H. Liu of GeekDad for including Should We Buy A Gun? in his Stack Overflow column for this week.
My favorite enthusiasm: “This book is an attempt by Cowen and Wexler (themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum) to try to dig into the question in a way that allows everyone to feel heard.”
And my favorite criticism: “It…felt like things wrapped up in a tidy way that didn’t feel entirely realistic.”
Check out the full article which includes coverage of the Huckleberry Finn graphic reimagining Big Jim And The White Boy by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson and published by Ten Speed Graphic here.
How I Met Ezra Claytan Daniels
I met Ezra Claytan Daniels at his booth at Comic Arts Los Angeles!
He had a very strong elder mentor vibe.
We talked about his books UPGRADE SOUL and Are You At Risk For Empathy Myopia?
And he was incredibly forthright and helpful.
Sharing how difficult the publishing process can be.
How he had to self-publish despite having friends who were editors.
How he jokingly called his publishing company Independent.
And he seemed genuinely interested in my goal of publishing my book that following year.
And me potentially having my own table at CALA the next time too.
I’ve just applied for that.
So we shall see!
He followed me on Instagram.
And I happened to reach out to him this month.
The same month he told me he wrapped a season of an amazing gig.
As a writer on the TV show SEVERANCE!
OK, without further adieu.
His work and Q&A is brilliant, too.
And I’m so happy to share it with you!
Ezra Claytan Daniels
EZRA CLAYTAN DANIELS is a mixed-race (black/white) writer and illustrator. His critically acclaimed graphic novel series, The Changers, began a unique career peppered with collaborative multimedia projects ranging from video games to animation to feature documentaries.
Ezra’s early art career was carved out of nights and weekends while working as a trial graphics consultant, creating technical illustrations and infographics for high stakes court cases. Ezra notably worked with the Department of Justice on the Rod Blagojevich trial. Ezra later transitioned to user interface design, designing the branding and interface for the very first PDF annotation mobile app, the million+ user iAnnotate PDF.
Ezra is the creator of the popular live art spectacle, “The Comic Art Battle”, which was a staple of the Stumptown Comics Festival and the template for countless iterations at comics and art events throughout the country, as well as Loaded Blanks Greetings, a line of fill-in-the-blanks comic-art greeting cards featuring both established as well as up and coming comics artists.
Ezra collaborated with Chicago-based chamber group Fifth House Ensemble on the narrative concert series, Black Violet, which the Chicago Sun-Times called “a modern classic”. He also contributed animation to experimental hip hop luminary Alexis Gideon’s “Video Musics” series of animated rap operas and has worked on several interactive projects with esteemed interactive artist Erik Loyer. Ezra contributed animation and design to the feature documentaries, Lunch Line and Resistance, as well as the LA-Emmy award-winning second season of KCET’s Lost LA docuseries.
His collaboration with experimental video artist Adebukola Bodunrin, the animated short film “The Golden Chain”, has screened at the The Whitney Museum, The British Film Institute, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, MFA Boston, REDCAT Theater, ATA San Francisco, at Art Basel, Switzerland, and on the Criterion Channel. In 2017, “The Golden Chain“was acquired by The Whitney for their permanent collection.
Ezra's graphic novel, Upgrade Soul, began as a pioneering immersive serialized graphic novel for iOS in 2012. 'Upgrade Soul' has been frequently featured on the Apple App Store, was named a 2013 IndieCade Finalist, and has exhibited at The Hyde Park Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Upgrade Soul was a featured project at the Fantoche International Animation Festival in Baden, Switzerland, Haarlem Stripdagen in Amsterdam, and the Fumetto International Comics Festival in Lucerne. Upgrade Soul was collected in print by Lion Forge Books in 2018. It was the recipient of the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, nominated for Eisner, Harvey, Ringo, and Ignatz awards, and was named one of the best books of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Vulture, The Library Journal, and Paste. Upgrade Soul is currently in development as a feature film.
Ezra’s graphic novel collaboration with Ben Passmore, entitled BTTM FDRS, was released in 2019 by Fantagraphics Books. BTTM FDRS was named one of the best books of 2019 by Chicago Public Library, New York Public Library, and Hyperallergic Magazine, and was nominated for both Eisner and Harvey awards. BTTM FDRS is currently in development as a feature film.
Ezra’s followup collaboration with filmaker Adebukola Bodunrin, an experimental live action sci-fi short entitled, “We Are Not Alone” premiered at SXSW and screened at Chicago International Film Festival, Images Toronto, Uppsalla, and Ann Arbor, where it won The No. 1 African Film Award.
Ezra currently resides in Los Angeles, CA, where he writes for comics, film and television, including work for Marvel Comics’ Wolverine and Deathlok, the superhero comedy series, Doom Patrol for HBO Max, the Amazon sci-fi drama, Lightyears, and the smash-hit, Severance, for Apple TV+.
UPGRADE SOUL
For their 45th anniversary, Hank and Molly Nonnar decide to undergo an experimental rejuvenation procedure, but their hopes for youth are dashed when the couple is faced with the results: severely disfigured yet intellectually and physically superior duplicates of themselves. Can the original Hank and Molly coexist in the same world as their clones? In Upgrade Soul, McDuffie Award-winning creator Ezra Claytan Daniels asks probing questions about what shapes our identity-Is it the capability of our minds or the physicality of our bodies? Is a newer, better version of yourself still you? This page-turning graphic novel follows the lives of Hank and Molly as they discover the harsh truth that only one version of themselves is fated to survive.
Eerie Concept, Eerier Art
Upgrade Soul has a very eerie concept.
About how we might modify our bodies.
But what happens to other parts of us as a result.
And the sci-fi conceit’s ingenuity.
Is satisfyingly matched by a visionary art style.
That’s similarly gripping.
Unique Commentary on Post-Racial Commentary
Claytan Daniels also has a side story about a comics maker.
How one generation had to hide their black hero in science fiction.
But others don’t have to.
What’s interesting too is that the upgraded version of this character.
Even though he’s no longer obviously black.
Has a seemingly more evolved view of post-racism.
Though even that is obviously quite complicated…
Severance before Severance
As Ezra mentions in his interview.
This is definitely a comic that you will like if you like the TV show SEVERANCE.
It employs a similar but different metaphor about severing.
It’s very much it’s own thing.
But I find it fascinating that the solo maker of such an important foreunning indie comic.
Now writes on the popular mainstream studio show.
It gives me great hope as a solo maker of indie comics.
OK, let’s enjoy the conversation with ECD!
Q&A with Ezra Claytan Daniels
1. SerioComics: We met at Comic Arts Los Angles. You mentioned that you had trouble publishing UPGRADE SOUL due to editorial perception of it being self-made. Editors who were your friends wouldn’t look at it seriously. Until you entered in for and won an award. Can you talk about why you think that is still part of the nature of editors or humans? Also what was the award you won?
ECD: I won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics in 2017. It’s awarded at the Long Beach Comic Expo. I don’t remember how I found out about the award, but I used the submission deadline as my deadline to finish Upgrade Soul, which I’d been chipping away at on nights and weekends for about 15 years. It was the third year of the award and it didn’t have a huge profile, but one of the judges, Will Watkins, told me after the ceremony that my life was about to change. I probably smiled and nodded, but I never could’ve imagined how right he was.
I think the thing Will knew is just that the gatekeepers of the world, be they publishing editors or film producers, live and die by their judgement being perceived as trustworthy. So it’s just a lot safer for them to open the door for ideas that have already been vetted by some other entity–be it an award win, a recommendation from someone influential, or the idea being a pre-existing IP. I think a REALLY good exec or editor is one who has good enough taste and instincts to trust themselves and take a chance on new ideas. But I can totally see why things work the way they do. It’s just about survival, all the way up.
2. SerioComics: At CALA, I also bought a short book you made called Are You At Risk For Empathy Myopia? I feel like there was a period of time where empathy was seen as a value in progressive culture. But recently again we’ve been seeing talk from conservatives that empathy weakens culture. Do you think empathy is an inherently good value or do you think its part of a difference in value structures, whether those be cultural or neurological or something else?
ECD: I just think about what kind of society I want to live in. I’d rather live in a society where people who need help get help, than one where people who need help are punished. I believe it makes society as a whole better and stronger if every single member is afforded the means to thrive and contribute. Imagine all the brilliant minds that could’ve made all our lives better and richer but never got the chance because they were born poor or were wiped out by medical debt or never had somebody to fight for them when they faltered.
I feel like a piece of my soul dies every time I step over someone passed out on the street and do nothing to help them. The fact that that’s the normal way to behave is the most obvious and relatable indication I can think of that there’s nothing but rot at the core of our social and economic structure.
As for any difference in opinions on empathy in progressive versus conservative minds, I won’t pretend to be an expert. But one of the things I learned making that comic, from speaking with sociologist Adam Waytz, is that conservatives don’t suffer from a lack of empathy, they just tend to keep it within their perceived ingroup. I think that’s why, for me, talk of class solidarity is so important, because it brings people–especially conservative-minded people–to the idea that their ingroup isn’t just the people in their church or the people who vote the same way as them. Their ingroup is everybody who is suffering under the same predatory economic structure.
3. SerioComics: UPGRADE SOUL is one of those science-fiction high concepts that keeps feeling more and more possible. While we’ve moved somewhat to AI as a fear of human replacement, I tend to think that humans will not be replaced by AI completely, but that we will be modified. Your book explores this in a way. What kind of research, personal hopes and fears, or influences did you have in coming up with the conceit?
ECD: Well, I wanted to write a horror story so I sat down to try to think of the scariest thing I could imagine. Not what kind of monster scared me, but what scared me deep down, emotionally. At the time I’d just moved away from my hometown where I was a star athlete and the best artist in my school. I moved to Portland, Oregon to go to art school and suddenly found myself surrounded by all these kids who were better than me at everything I’d always defined myself as being the best at. It was terrifying to me at the time because it was like, if I’m not the guy who’s the best illustrator or whatever, then who am I? What’s my value? It came from a really capitalist mindset, but you know, in my early 20’s I’m also thinking about things like how will I fare in the job market, am I good enough to make a career out of this? So that’s where Upgrade Soul came from.
As for AI, yeah it totally gets at that same fear, that fear of obsolescence that I think we all have deep down. What’s the point of me if there’s a machine that can do my job better than I can? But I wonder again how much of that is just a capitalist mindset. The problem of course is that AI will take jobs way before we move beyond capitalism, but I do try to be optimistic about it. Will it completely change everything? Absolutely. But it’s not like things are working out particularly well for us as they are, right? The fear is that AI will increase inequality or even wipe us all out if it becomes sentient, but I also tend to think those doomsday scenarios are looking at things through the wrong lens. Here’s my, maybe hopelessly naively optimistic, take:
What does AI “want”? It wants data and information to build more robust models and recognize increasingly complex patterns. Humans–and all living things–are an enormous generator of unique information, and that “information production” only increases with biodiversity and healthy social structures. So if I’m an all-powerful AI that feeds off knowledge, wouldn’t I want to create the means by which humans and the natural world thrive in ways they’ve never before been able to?
The other thing I think about is, to your point, the integration of humans and AI. We do tend to think of AI as an outside entity that we interact with through a laptop, but that’s obviously a really anachronistic way to imagine it. A more likely scenario that I see is that interface friction being reduced and reduced to the point that the line between a human mind and its AI augmentation becomes almost indecipherable. And at that point the wants and needs of AI could only align with our own.
I don’t know, again, maybe I’m just being naive, but we’ll never find our way into the good timeline if we can’t even imagine what it might look like.
4. SerioComics: You mentioned via DM that you are writing on the latest season of the TV show SEVERANCE. Congratulations, that’s amazing. I notice a lot of parallels between UPGRADE SOUL and the Apple show. In both, the characters are severed and one half affects the other. Were you hired based on this book as a sample? What’s it like writing for a staff of a TV show versus your own independent comics?
ECD: I can’t say exactly what the producers saw in me to offer me that job. I don’t use Upgrade Soul as my writing sample–I have a TV pilot script I use for that. But I do know that one of the producers was a big fan of Upgrade Soul and BTTM FDRS so when my sample came through it got a big boost. But yeah the parallels to Upgrade Soul are pretty uncanny. I can’t imagine a better fit for me than Severance.
Working on a TV show is obviously hugely different than working on comics. And like you said, independent comics are even further removed from TV than mainstream comics because, at least with Upgrade Soul, I was really a one-man army. I don’t think I’ll ever stop making comics because it’s a place where I can always do exactly what I want, no matter how weird. And even more importantly it’s a place where I don’t really have to get anybody’s permission to put my ideas out into the world. That empathy comic you mentioned was just something I self-published and sold at cons.
Getting a film or TV show to the point where it actually gets produced is such an incredibly rare thing. 99% of the ideas people have in Hollywood will never ever see the light of day. So I’ll always keep a foot in comics. But writing for TV has definitely trained me to be a faster, more agile, and more open-minded writer. Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned working in writers rooms is to not be precious with my ideas. In a room you learn really quickly not to get attached to anything you pitch because even great ideas are constantly falling through the cracks for all kinds of reasons. So you just have to constantly come up with more great ideas! With my own stuff, in the past, I’ve wasted so much time and creative energy trying to work around ideas I got attached to, even when it just wasn’t working–or maybe the idea just wasn’t even as good as I initially thought it was. Now I’m so much better at just letting things go so I can keep moving. No idea is too precious to kill. I can always come up with more ideas.
5. SerioComics: Can you tell us more about your art style? What are your influences and strategies and process there? And lastly what should we look for in your back catalogue as well as what’s to come?
ECD: When I started drawing Upgrade Soul I was working as a trial graphics artist, doing medical and technical illustrations and charts and graphs for high-profile court cases. My main challenge was to reduce incredibly complex information into images that could be understood from 30 feet across a room by a layperson judge or jury. It was all about clarity of information. So that’s where my head was when I started drawing the book. I really wanted to make a comic that was just easy for people to read! I didn’t want readers to ever have to stop and think, “okay, now where is this character standing” or “which characters are part of this conversation” because that takes them out of the story. I took a lot of inspiration from one movie in particular: “4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, which is filled with lots of one-shot takes where the camera is locked down and we’re watching the characters move through the scene rather than chasing them around and cutting as if the camera itself has a perspective. It was a real challenge to force myself to lock the camera down like that because you always want to cut to a close up or another angle because you get scared the scene is going to feel boring if you don’t. But it just forced me to add visual intrigue in other, more emotional ways, like putting extra emphasis on gesture and posture, so every character is always communicating something whether they’re speaking or not; whether you can see their face or not. It ended up being a much more subtle and compelling way for me to build tension and get into the characters’ headspace rather than relying on expressive camera angles or splash panels or whatever.
And I really wanted Upgrade Soul to have a distinct feel in the realm of horror comics. I didn’t want it to feel grimy or everything cast in shadow like a typical horror comic. I wanted readers to feel the horror of everything being constantly bathed in nauseating fluorescents. Nothing is ever purely dark in the book. There’s always some bright light seeping in from under a door or some electronic monitor someplace. There’s no escape from what they’re doing at that lab.
As for what’s next, I’m always working on 4 or 5 things at once, but the next thing coming out is my first full length graphic novel in 6 years, “Mama Came Callin’”. It’s a swamp noir/crime thriller set in Florida. I wrote it and it was drawn by new artist Camilla Sucre, in her comics debut. It’s coming out in February from William Morrow.
Thank you so much to Ezra!
Monthly Gun Debate Update June 2025
In May, we talked about how Texas was moving forward with the exact opposite of a Red Flag bill i.e. a bill to limit Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs).
That bill did indeed pass in June. So ERPOs and Red Flag laws are largely blocked there. Though Texas makes exceptions for judges to issue ERPOs in criminal cases and for existing domestic violence protection orders.
Meanwhile, Minnesota faced tragedy this month with the assassination of two state representatives. Authorities there said it would have been difficult to stop the suspected shooter even under Minnesota’s existing ERPO laws.
No one knew he had amassed an arsenal, partly because Minnesota, like all but 7 states, doesn’t have a gun registry, and red-flag laws rely on warning signs like mental illness that weren’t visible in his case.
With Texas reducing red-flag laws despite mounting evidence of their value. But also Minnesota discovering the limits of such laws when records fall short. The debate continues over how best to balance rights and safety…
Thanks for reading!